Thoughts about virtual people

In certain occasions my wife and I change cars between us. Being today one of those moments I swap the car register documents. And I was shocked. I’ve never realized what was on the back: a QR code! So many years with one and I’ve just discovered them last month.

But I’ve never seen a PSP or GNR officer with a scan device of any sort.

After being in touch with QR codes and learned about its possibilities I discovered that Microsoft has its own type of alternative, higher capacity code. It’s called High Capacity Color Barcode. It’s not a 2D code but a stream wrapped code.

Their intellectual property rights and the need for higher resolution scanners can give an advantage to QR codes. However it has a feature quite more interesting than the competition: color. This will certainly integrate better with brochures and colorful packages than with a black & white one.

So, QR codes start coloring yourselves!
Even if it’s the same data within, the colors don’t mean any information, it can be used more freely and inspirational.

I’ve tried some variations with my last code so I could feel the difference. The test was made with the conditions of my last post, taking snaphots from a Thinkpad T43 screen.

These worked quite well and I got the message from the code.

But the following examples did not.

I haven’t made more tests to check the right contrast or quantify the minimal color space to make it work.

That’s a job for the pro pals out there and I’ll be waiting for their suggestions.

This start to be even more useful with a camera enabled mobile phone.You can capture URL, phone numbers, addresses, you name it.I used the QR code reader from Kaywa. I launched Opera Mini in my Sony Ericsson k750i and went to http://reader.kaywa.com/ to get the capture application. It didn’t work. Maybe Opera Mini doesn’t send the phone model as Kaywa is expecting. A messages appeared saying that my mobile wasn’t supported.

I didn’t surrender. Launched the default browser of the phone and it worked! The java application is quite simple and controls your camera just for snapshots. It takes a photo, analyses it and gives the result.

As a test, I used the online generator. All examples work well, url, phone, small sms, but text not as I was expecting. For a bunch of 60 characters it recognized very well. More than this it just couldn’t find any code on the image. Even with L and XL sizes.

But, even with this limitation, it works very well and I think we have here a versatile way of passing information between some media. I can just photo a code, meaning an address, in a brochure and get right away the text in my address book. To be explored better.

I’ve just started to check the possible Metaverse environments of nowadays.
Being Second Life the hype I started looking for alternatives and bumped with There. Right from its front page I can see some really nice advantages.

The rendering of the world is different, well made, a bit of comic style which I think it’s great so we don’t always need a recent graphics card. That way it’s possible to have a large number of client types for several operating systems, devices and many internet access technologies. This is an advantage! I which…

Unfortunately checking the System Requirements made me delay the experience. It only works for Windows 98 and up, you must have a hardware accelerated graphics card.

Although all these arguments just collapsed the idea of a Metaverse candidate, I’m pleased to see they support 56k dial up connections – have to check that. However it can mean they don’t do much media or world stream. But then again Quakeworld worked quite well over dial up modems and old computers. Ok, I’m looking for something better than Quake, but you get the idea. The world should be accessible by low end computers even if you get less rendering and even less colours. In Quakeworld I could play even if I had a 320×200 screen and not seeing much definition, against 800×600 adversaries that almost could aim to my body parts. I never won many times it’s a fact, but I could play and interact with the world and the other users.

There are several more topics of such an environment should have, but I’ll leave it to another time.

What ? I can’t create an avatar ? I’m not using Internet Explorer and I can only create one with it ? WHY ?

I though that There, having a former Ebay architect as a CEO, was capable of attracting everyone and not entered in this naïf argument “I just work with IE”. It recalls me of the child in the playground that takes his ball away because he’s loosing the game.

On the old days there were email to ftp (and vice-versa) gateways to help people. There was even a MUD to email gateway. Did the time gone slowly 10/15 years ago, as there were indead players using it ?,This is just a modern test.